Should Have Been Me
by Timesprite
Summary: (Cable, Domino)An instant can make all the difference.


Untitled

Disclaimer: Cable and Dom aren't mine. I'm not making any money from this. This thing was written in about a half hour stretch, and the concept is a little bit odd. So if you go huh? I did good. *G* Thanks for this go out to Kaleko. 

Should Have Been Me 

You trick yourself into believing that because you don't think of it, you've dealt with it, you've moved on. Then you open your eyes, open them as if for the first time, and you find you're still standing there. It's three years later and you haven't moved. 

You pretend that just because you're breathing you're still alive. Your heart keeps going despite the days you wish it wouldn't. And every beat hurts. Every breath hurts. It hurts and hurts and hurts until you hate him for it. Hate him so much, and it only makes the pain worse.  
Never better. 

Look at the calendar, realize the time. It was this day. It was this time, this exact hour, you know. Know it with certainty, though for all the memories you have of that instant you never remember looking at the clock.   
This moment, here. 

Then the emptiness in the back of your head, that place that was him, starts to ache again. Not a real pain, there's nothing left of him to hurt. He's safe, so far from that pain now. That pain that felt as if it would swallow you whole. No, it's not him. It's the _absence_ of him, like a phantom limb, like your brain and heart trying to recreate him there in that place that was once golden, but has since cooled to darkness. 

There was numbness for a long time. For so long... I couldn't let myself face it. There was a void I was standing on the edge of, and to face it meant choosing whether to stare it down or jump. And jumping would have been so easy. 

It faded into hate, after awhile. The numbness did, that is. I stopped being numb and I started to hate him. It was easier than missing him. I could blame him instead. Hate him forever for shoving me out of the way, for being a second too slow. I hated him for dying. And sometimes, I still do. 

I had to watch. I watched as the life poured out of him and that damned virus leapt upon his helplessness like a rabid dog. I couldn't do a thing. I could feel him dying and I couldn't move. Not through that pain. Not as I watched him, as I felt that tenuous link that was _us_ die. I felt as if my mind had caved in, and when I woke up this morning, when I looked at the calendar, I realized it had. 

I stand here. I stare up at the sky, I look at the people around me. I watch them laugh and I wonder how they do it. I can't laugh, it hurts too much. He could always make me laugh when no one else could. I light up my last cigarette and take a deep drag.   
It should have been me.   
Who's laughing now? 

---- 

That scream in my head, that terror that I had only felt once before in my life--in an instant that would never give me peace no matter how many times I said goodbye, it still echoed there--that scream.   
Pain. 

Mine, hers, I couldn't know, maybe there was no difference. Ours, like everything was ours now. Nothing I did could stop it. Nothing could stop that scream, that pain. It was all-encompassing. The part of me that was her was dying and I couldn't stop it. Nothing could. I was there. I had her there in front of me and her lips were going blue, and she couldn't scream aloud--there was too much blood, so much--and my hands were red with it. Stained with it as she died. She died...   
I died. 

Funny how I still see her in my sleep. I see her trying to breath, failing, seeing the blood that choked her as she tried to scream and couldn't. I can call to mind a thousand images of her alive, smiling, laughing. I can see her angry, I can see her fighting. But in my sleep she's always dying and I can't stop it. 

After all this time, after three years of living with her ghost, it's still hard to convince myself she's gone. I force myself to stare at that blankness in my head, that place that's empty now, empty again after I'd finally managed to fill it. After I'd managed to deal with Aliya's death and trust again. I make myself look so I remember she's gone.   
Dom's gone, and I can't get her back. 

Some nights, after I wake from the nightmares, when I manage to break free of that endless loop that is her dying, I hate myself. I was a few seconds to slow; I couldn't save her. I held her in my hands, tried to hold her together with my own two hands. I felt her go cold. I saw the look in her eyes as she slipped away. I hate myself for it. 

You can't ever recover from a thing like that. She was my partner; she was my best friend. She was my lover, but that was almost incidental. She was all those things to me, all in one. And in an instant, I lost them all. I lost her. 

I've run it through my head a thousand times. That one moment where my life changes forever... again. I've been defined by my losses it seems. Most men do not have the chance to love twice in a lifetime. Fewer still lose love twice. So I've sat down and gone over it. I've studied every second like they were the pieces on a chessboard. I've gone over all the strategies I didn't have time for then. I've calculated, I've manipulated. I've pondered it to the point where my family, such as they are, called it morbid.   
They called it sick. 

They don't understand. They could never understand. You see, I've gone over it a thousand times. I never thought I'd be so thankful for the perfect telepathic memory I have of that moment, but I am. It's brought me to a conclusion. After three years of pain, of watching her die each and every night, I've found the answer. It was either her, or me. In every outcome, every possible scenario, it's either her, or it's me. One of us always dies.   
It should have been me. 

End 


End file.
